It’s great to not have to queue up with the great unwashed and retax my car for the grand total of £20. Chances are my upgraded car next year, while the same or similar CO2 emissions, will incur a much greater premium.

While it would punish me greater than many, I believe in a pepper-corn Road Tax but charge for Motorway mileage. It would balance out tax according to emissions more equitably. Those who choose to do limited miles in a petrol V8 are no more disadvantaged than a high mileage Euro7 diseasel.
A low mileage road user by average deposits less pollutants than a high mileage user.
For business users there would be tax rebates but all have to be claimed/proven rather than simply allowed adhoc.

This - and it’s a much better incentive to drive clean cars, which is what the current system tries to but fails when you can drive a gas guzzler 50 miles/yr or 50k and pay the same amount of ‘road’ tax.

A low mileage road user by average deposits less pollutants than a high mileage user.

True. And it’s an important point. But, very roughly, about as much energy is used in making a car (mining, transporting and refining the metal ores, turning oil into the plastics, making the glass and rubber parts, driving the whole lot from plant to plant during the assembly process, painting, etc, etc) as is used by burning the fuel it consumes over its lifetime. So if we really wanted to tax the whole pollution burden then we’d need to have a fixed element, like car tax, to cover the making of the car and a mileage element, like fuel duty, to cover the running of it.

True. And it’s an important point. But, very roughly, about as much energy is used in making a car (mining, transporting and refining the metal ores, turning oil into the plastics, making the glass and rubber parts, driving the whole lot from plant to plant during the assembly process, painting, etc, etc) as is used by burning the fuel it consumes over its lifetime. So if we really wanted to tax the whole pollution burden then we’d need to have a fixed element, like car tax, to cover the making of the car and a mileage element, like fuel duty, to cover the running of it.

Industry itself makes the manufacturing cost and it’s associated pollution burden, pretty equal. Few, if any other than Hybrid manufacturing, uses exotic materials which differ enormously from their mainstream competitor, I don’t see the necessity for a blanket tax.

Unless, of course, you are suggesting a Manufacturing Tax which means we will ALL pay anyway.

It’s just that cars are unusual in that one of the reasons for taxing them seems to be to drive their owners towards generating less pollution. We don’t tax woodburning stoves or plastic bottles (yet) or the use of electricity or moist bogroll, all of which create pollution problems in their own ways. My point was that if we’re going to pick on cars then maybe we shouldn’t just tax the pollution that comes from operating them. Maybe we should also tax the pollution that comes from making them in the first place. It would be a little bit of rationality in an otherwise largely irrational approach to taxing society’s pollution sources.